Politics & Government
Microsoft Denies Involvement in Government Surveillance Program
The Washington Post reports Microsoft was the National Security Agency's "first partner" for a secret monitoring program called PRISM.
Microsoft has issued a statement denying involvement in the secret government surveillance program brought to light by The Washington Post on Thursday.
Here is the entire statement, as posted in the Redmond-based company's online news center:
We provide customer data only when we receive a legally binding order or subpoena to do so, and never on a voluntary basis. In addition we only ever comply with orders for requests about specific accounts or identifiers. If the government has a broader voluntary national security program to gather customer data we don’t participate in it.
The Washington Post story reports Microsoft was the "first partner" when the National Security Agency's so-called PRISM program began in 2007.
Other tech companies, including Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL (Patch's parent company), Dropbox and Apple, have become involved since then, enabling NSA and the FBI to "(tap) directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs that enable analysts to track foreign targets...," according to the report.
All the other companies have also denied involvement in the program.
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